


this is your heart (never let it rule your head)

by speakmefair



Series: Formidable Combination [1]
Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Autopsies, Blackmail, Death, Fire, M/M, a fair number of dead people, brief descriptions of corpses, guns and the shooting thereof, morgues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-18
Updated: 2012-06-18
Packaged: 2017-11-06 01:24:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/413180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>BBC Sherlock AU.  Mark is supposed to be dead.  So is Erica.  It doesn't seem to have been anything more than a temporary problem for either of them.  Milton, on the other hand, <i>is</i> dead, and Eduardo is trying to work out why none of these things add up to something which makes sense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is your heart (never let it rule your head)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slasher48](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slasher48/gifts).



_What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song? Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price of all a man hath._  
— William Blake

~~~

**Then**

"And... you're _happy_ here?" Eduardo asks, not so much out of any genuine desire to know as complete disbelief.

The combination of Dustin, a steady job, and a morgue isn't really one that would occur to most sane people, after all, and it might be a long time since he's even spoken to Dustin, but he can't have changed that much, can he?

"Sure," Dustin says cheerfully, and wow, okay, maybe he has changed, maybe he's gotten all serious while Eduardo's been — away, and that's a whole revolution in world order he really wasn't expecting. "I mean, free experiment opportunities, right?"

Or not.

"You... experiment on them?" There's an awful lot of drawers, even if most of them are probably empty. Maybe Dustin's gone all Dr. Frankenstein on the world in the last few years, rather than settled down.

"Well, not on _them_ , on the pathology samples, but hee, that's a thought, next time we get a John Doe I could, like, falsify some paperwork and —"

There's a banging on one of the drawers, and some muffled shouting that would be less terrifying if it didn't involve Dustin's name.

"Oh my God," says Eduardo.

"Oops," says Dustin, and hurries over to pull the drawer open. Its occupant sits up and delivers a pithy little diatribe on the state of Dustin's brain in a rapid-fire monotone.

Eduardo wonders if he's dreaming. Or on drugs. Or had a psychotic break some time ago and just didn't notice. Any or all of those would be preferable to the horrible suspicion that this is, in fact, reality.

"The timer didn't go off!" Dustin protests, waving his hands around. "So there's obviously time left, and so it's totally not my fault, Mark, okay?"

"Did you even, wow, let me think, set it?"

There's a nasty little silence. Dustin takes out his phone and actually cringes at it its blank display. The former corpse, whose name is apparently Mark, sighs. Its teeth are chattering, which is the first sign of genuine animation Eduardo's noticed in it.

"Yeah," it says. "Amazing. Thanks, Dustin. Sometime, I've really got to trust you with not freezing to death. Oh. Wait."

"Sorry," says Dustin meekly. "Oh, hey, but I've got good news!"

"You've scheduled yourself in for ECT?" demands former-corpse Mark.

"Don't be _mean_ ," Dustin says, cheerfulness undented by his look of vague underlying apology. "No, look who I found!"

The reanimated drawer-occupant looks at Eduardo for a full five beats.

"That's... nice, Dustin," he says slowly. "And I'm supposed to —"

"You were looking for someone to share your apartment, right? Now that you're not being pa — you know, to help with — in case you got lonely?"

Eduardo finds himself sharing an incredulous look with the semi-frozen Mark. Anyone less likely to get lonely, even on two minutes' worth of literally frosty acquaintanceship, is difficult to imagine.

"No," Mark says flatly.

"He's looking for a place to live," Dustin continues.

"No, really, I'm —" Eduardo starts to protest, and Dustin steamrollers over him in a horribly familiar way that time and distance have not helped him forget.

"And I thought, hey! I'm not moving back in with Mark even if he pays me, because ew, the fridge, and also you keep getting investigated and there's the way you keep making dead people attached to living people who kind of really want to kill you, and just no. Anyway, I like my place. But yeah, Eduardo won't mind, because, you know, he just got out of the sort-of Army, so it won't bother him." He folds his arms proudly.

"Investigated?" Eduardo says weakly, not even bothering to untangle the rest of it.

"Give me your jacket," says Mark.

Eduardo's the only one surprised when he takes it off and hands it over. He's _not_ surprised when he doesn't even get a nod of thanks.

And he's very amused by just how ridiculous Mark looks wearing it when he hops off the sliding drawer and heads towards the door.

"Are you coming, then?" he demands.

Eduardo looks at Dustin.

"He means you," Dustin says, grinning. "So if you ever want to see that jacket again..."

Wondering just when he entered the Twilight Zone, Eduardo duly follows.

~~~

**Now**

Of all the undignified situations Eduardo has found himself in over the last six weeks, and there have been several, up to and including the never-to-be-spoken-of-again night that Dustin locked him in the morgue with Sean and the autopsy list 

(admittedly he thought he was locking him in with Mark, in some Dustin-ish way of forcing them to _talk_ to each other, but that's _beside the point_ )

this has got to be up there in the top three.

He blames Mark. For all of it.

Mark, on the other hand, blames Erica. 

Loudly. Fluently. And unstoppably. 

It would be almost entertaining, if not for the fact that all the grievances Mark is currently listing — the rain, the fact they are on the ladder of a fire escape _in_ the rain, the very dead body in the room beneath them with the _bolted window_ , the rain, the fact that oh yes, rain makes things wet, the dead body, Erica having turned the suspect they'd been after _into_ the dead body —

(nice shot, but Eduardo doesn't think saying that is a particularly good idea right now, because pissed as he is at Mark in general, he's somehow reluctant to make that feeling into a two-way interactive process)

— the rain — didn't also happen to be things that Eduardo is suffering from too.

Except his suffering is worse, because he's _with Mark_ , who doesn't seem to understand just how much Eduardo does not want to hear his voice. 

Ever again, for preference, but Eduardo is getting to the stage where he'd happily settle for 'in the next ten minutes'.

Futilely, he tries to convey his desire to ensure that silence by way of several violent and satisfying methods, straight into Mark's brain. 

It's always worth attempting to avoid having to actually use words that will be completely ignored by means of telepathic imagery, even though it's never worked on Mark to date, either pre- or post- his assumed death, and probably won't work now, either.

"I hate her _so much_ ," Mark says, oblivious as ever to the hopes, prayers, and fervent and gory wishes of those around him. Eduardo doesn't even bother to reply this time. "I mean, what the fuck, she couldn't just — it would have — he's no use _dead_ , what was she even thinking?"

Eduardo, who was lucky 

(or unlucky, he's not quite sure which) 

enough to see the look on Erica's face just before she fired her ludicrously expensive gun, the shot hitting dead centre between Milton's eyes, is fairly sure she hadn't been thinking anything at all other than _die_. 

Possibly also _you son-of-a-bitch_ , but that might have just been him. Then again, if he'd been capable of wearing Erica's heels, never mind walking two steps in them, he'd have taken those two steps straight across the carpet and slammed the metal caps on those same heels right into each of Milton's eyes, 

(step, step, and it wouldn't have been so different, the sound and feel, not so different, blending into one sense under his foot; not so different from a loose grape on a tile floor)

giving him three holes in his head, not just one —

(why should he get them closed with dignity, when he lived and reveled in sewage and filth and his perverted and perverse love of others' degradation?)

Of course, Erica's never one for the obvious. It's probably why the corpse looks so frighteningly neat.

Erica's also supposed to be dead.

But then, so is Mark. 

Or so _was_ Mark, Eduardo's still not completely sure about how that one works, if it works at all.

(It worked all too well for too long, but he still can't think about that without wanting to break things, so he doesn't.)

Mark hadn't even left a body. 

(But neither had Erica)

Mark had left a burned and unrecognizable — _thing_ , crumbling in places and half its teeth shattered by the unbelievable heat of the magnesium-set fire he'd been caught in, not even enough left of the ones remaining for identification.

(he'd planned it well)

Mark had left them nothing but disbelieving horror as a platform from which to mourn, and he had _no right_ to come back from that and expect the world to welcome him.

No right to expect Eduardo to welcome him back into the apartment that had once been so very much his, and is now so very deliberately anything but a shrine.

No right to expect forgiveness.

No right to anything at all, even Dustin's couch, and fuck, Dustin, Dustin who'd _known_ Mark wasn't dead; while the rest of them tried throughout all those bleak months to pick up the pieces of lives and friendships and rent and police cases that were, are, now considered not to have a result because the provider of evidence was _gone_ , is gone, God, how is Sean coping, what happens now? — Dustin had known.

And the rest of them hadn't even been 

(still aren't)

important enough to merit a bit of hope or even unpalatable truth.

And Eduardo doesn't think he's ever going to stop being angry, stop hating, stop _loathing_ Mark for having done that to him, to all of them. Because what kind of man just fakes his own death, to save a woman the world's mostly forgotten?

To save a woman the world believes to be _dead_?

The answer's in the question, and unhappily in close proximity.

Only Mark. 

Only Mark, who thinks that the end justifies the means.

Mark, self-created devil of his own mythology.

Mark, whom Eduardo thinks these days should have just stayed dead, and hurt everyone less that way.

Right now, however, _living in the moment_ , just as his therapist told him the last time

(the absolutely last time, thank you, never again)

that he saw her, Eduardo's bitterly conscious of the fact that if only 'supposed to be dead' translated to 'deceased and therefore shutting the fuck up', he wouldn't even mind the fire escape so much. 

(Said fire escape, or rather the ladder of said fire escape, is either welded to itself or rusted or designed by someone with spatial difficulties. Either way, it's nowhere near reaching the ground, and Eduardo doesn't feel like adding broken bones from badly-timed jumping to the woes of his evening, so he's staying put).

But then, Mark dead had never been exactly silent, either, even if that had only been in his mind.

He carefully ignores the knowledge that when he _had_ thought Mark was dead, he would have given everything he had 

(not _just about_ everything, or _almost_ everything, _everything_. Everything.) 

for it not to be true, and he'd woken up each day thinking _exactly that_.

As it is, he should have been a bit more careful about what he'd wished for, because now that Mark is unmistakably in the land of the living, cursing out Erica, and dripping even more water _off his feet_ down the back of Eduardo's neck, Eduardo can't help wondering what the hell he'd been thinking.

Mark sneezes. His left foot jerks with the force of it, and thumps solidly into the middle of Eduardo's forehead.

"Sorry," he mutters.

Eduardo stares up at him through the heavy rain and the dark of the alleyway incredulously. What he can make out of Mark's expression has the audacity to appear perfectly sincere.

"You're going to apologize for _that_?" he demands.

"Um," Mark says, actually sounding confused, "yes? I mean, I didn't want to kick you in the head."

"That makes one of us," Eduardo mutters to the metal rungs.

"You want to — wait, no, that doesn't even — what?"

Eduardo sighs, and leans his forehead sideways onto his arm, and thereby, nastily, onto his sopping jacket. "Never mind," he says, with the inevitable hamster-on-a-wheel sense of exhaustion that's been overcoming him every time Mark spectacularly fails to just _see_ what he did that's so fucking wrong. 

_You were dead,_ he wants to say. _You were dead and you let me go all those months, weeks, days, hours, believing it was true, you let me mourn, you bastard, and yes, yes, fucking right you should be sorry, and yes, I want to kick myself in the head for trusting_ anything _you do, and right now I hate you more than anyone on the face of this planet, and we are stuck on a fire escape in the rain, and your feet are in my_ face _, and everything is dripping wet, and I just watched Erica shoot a guy, who's now very dead, and in about five minutes Sean is going to turn up, probably with all his little police minions trailing behind him, and he's going to laugh himself sick, and I really, really hate you._

"I'm sorry about Dustin and the morgue?" Mark offers eventually.

This time Eduardo just smacks his head into the metal rung in front of him, and prays for unconsciousness, or, barring that, a nice fuzzy concussion. 

"And, um, for Sean?" Mark is really trying, Eduardo thinks distantly. Shame none of it's going to work.

He thumps his head a couple more times onto the rung, in some desultory hope that repetitive action will gain him this time around what it so failed to do the first time.

Anything. _Anything_ to make the time pass in a comfortable haze before Sean and the inevitable hysterical circus arrive.

"Shut up, Mark," he says through gritted teeth, when neither unconsciousness nor hazy semi-delirium presents itself as a form of salvation.

There are a blissful few minutes of dripping silence, and then Mark, inevitably, breaks the peace by saying, as though it is a new and surprising thought that he hasn't voiced at least six times since they got out of Milton's room and abandoned his Erica-created corpse on the carpet —

"Fuck, I hate that woman."

Eduardo thinks wistfully of how much easier the last three years of his life would have been, if only that were true.

"Then why," he says with a great deal of accumulated bitterness that surprises even him, "did you let me think you'd died because of her?"

The quiet that follows is nothing like the one Eduardo had been hoping for.

The roofs and the fire escape and the rain drip and fall, and the water all around them hits the ground and puddles and concrete and guttering at different tempos.

It's either soothing or nerve-rattlingly syncopated, and Eduardo can't decide which.

And then Mark says, so quietly that at first Eduardo wasn't even sure he'd heard him at all, never mind correctly, his words uncharacteristically disjointed —

"But that's not why — I never meant — I didn't — I don't — wait, no, I — _Wardo_ —"

"Yes," Eduardo says flatly, because wouldn't it just figure, that the first attempt at an explanation Mark's even tried to give, and it's a really terrible, incoherent attempt at a lie? "Yes, yeah, you did. Now _shut up_."

Mercifully, Mark does, which is a new, if definitely welcome development.

Because if all it would have taken to fix this, all those months ago, if _all it would have taken_ to stop Milton and his blackmail and his increasing stranglehold over them all was Erica and her gun, then _why_ hasn't something like this happened sooner?

~~~

**Then**

"I don't see why it's my fault you're all stupid," Mark says, in defiance of Eduardo's urgent throat-cutting, shut-the-fuck-up-Mark gestures behind Divya Narendra's back.

_Stop pissing off the forensics guy_ Eduardo mouths at him urgently, hoping Divya doesn't turn around and catch him at it. Mark's traditional blank-eyed, expressionless stare in response could be aimed at either him or Divya, and he's rapidly losing the will to care about which one of them it is.

There is a muffled retching sound from the kitchen that's almost certainly someone unwisely investigating the do-not-use-this-for-food-ever fridge 

(that's Eduardo's rule, at least, and it works for him, at least to the point where he can generally be sure that what he's eating is what he thought he was _going_ to be eating) 

and an equally muffled scream from someone else who has, from the sound of smashing glass that follows it, quite _definitely_ found the two-hundred year old mummified fingers that were until seconds ago living peacefully in a jar in the cupboard above the sink.

(Mark claims they were there when he first moved in. Eduardo doesn't believe him for a second, and didn't even when Mark first told him that.)

Not for the first time, Eduardo wonders why the hell he's still living in this apartment, being periodically investigated by everyone from the ATF —

(and a more bizarre name for a sub-division of the FBI Eduardo still hasn't encountered, because seriously? Seriously? Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms _in that order_? It really does tell him way too much about their priorities — although it doesn't help much with what they might want of Mark, and he's resolutely not thinking about the fact that this once, it might have been more to do with him and the last subject on their list...)

— to once, in a bizarre turn of events which Mark _still_ hasn't managed to explain to him satisfactorily, Interpol, and having to put up with regular invasions from Sean Parker's impossibly annoying crime unit, because God forbid the man can do without making sure he has Mark's attention for more than a week.

The fact that Mark actually enjoys the cases Sean brings him is beside the point. 

The fact that Eduardo usually ends up enjoying working on them _with_ Mark is even more beside the point, because one of the few unchanging facts in Eduardo's world is that Sean Parker is an irritation worse than scabies and more ineradicable than cat fleas in summer, and he's not about to revise that opinion any time soon, no matter what happens.

"Divya," he starts in his best placatory tones, and Divya takes that, rather than anything Mark has said or done, as a mortal insult, which seems bitterly unfair.

"I have," he says angrily, turning on Eduardo, "a _professional title_."

"Associates Degree Narendra," Mark agrees blandly, because there is just no way Mark can stand anyone being paid attention to who isn't him. Sometimes, Eduardo thinks that's what makes him tolerate 

(because that's a better word than like, since Mark doesn't like _anyone_ ) 

Sean at all.

"Right," Divya snaps, turning to the unfortunate souls in the kitchen, "get in here and take up the carpeting."

"Oh no," Eduardo protests futilely. "Divya, no. Come on. It costs a fortune to have this replaced..."

"And every time I think the depths of stupidity have been reached," Mark says, apparently to the ceiling, "I am proved so wrong. So tragically wrong."

Eduardo tries, and fails miserably, not to laugh. 

Mark might be the most annoying man in the world, he might be an unquantifiable genius that no job title in the world has yet been invented for, and he's quite definitely the worst thing that has ever happened to Divya Narendra and his forensics team, but sometimes, random times, times like this, out of nowhere and for no good reason, Eduardo feels the kind of affection for him that leaves him completely unstrung.

Divya looks like he's thinking of ordering them both shot, and also that the fact he doesn't have the authority to give that order wouldn't stop him for a second.

Eduardo can't stop laughing, Divya's expression and his own emotions making him a little unhinged, and Mark looks back down from his contemplation of the ceiling's mysteries and gives him a tiny little grin of malicious pleasure.

Needless to say, the day goes downhill from there and straight into the depths of the inferno known as Implausible Paperwork, interspersed in all its bureaucratic hell by texts from Dustin, 

(who is doing something unspeakable in the morgue that for some reason needs all caps messages to convey in its full glory)

Chris,

(who is, as well as being one of Mark's inexplicably steadfast and unoffendable friends, a very very scary man in his own right and apparently pissed off by something Mark still hasn't done for him — and by extent for the President's office, and _how has this become Eduardo's life again_?)

— and for some reason, Sean, who is by now _in the apartment_ , so shouldn't need to be texting at all, and who is also smirking at them both.

Whatever it is Sean 

( _Detective Parker_ , he'd introduced himself as, right back when Eduardo had first moved into the chaos that is Mark's excuse for a life, _but hey, call me Sean,_ he'd added, with a canary-eating smile, and only Mark's eye-roll had prevented Eduardo from saying something truly nasty, or maybe just punching him in the face on the grounds of being an insufferable asshole) 

thinks he knows that he thinks no one else knows, it's put a look on his face that's enough to inspire thoughts in Eduardo of making him into the next homicide case, and not one that Eduardo would exactly encourage Mark to help solve, either.

Eduardo's also thinking of collecting up all the cell phones he can find and just jumping up and down on them. It might save time, or at least save Divya from the incipient aneurysm he's pretty sure is lying in wait for him if Mark doesn't either shut up or stop staring through him blankly every time he speaks.

While Eduardo had been revoltingly grateful for the offer of somewhere to live, just over a year ago — even if the circumstances had been truly weird — he might have been considerably less precipitate in expressing his gratitude if he'd ever, even briefly, imagined that this sort of afternoon would turn out to be _ordinary_.

(He should have guessed, given as he first met Mark when he was inhabiting a _morgue drawer_ , but he'd somehow assumed that was an aberration.)

He might also have been less grateful, period, if he'd remembered just what kind of terrible ideas Dustin thought were awesome solutions to life problems. 

But then it's been a very long time since college, and he hadn't even _noticed_ Mark in those days, difficult though that is to contemplate, because even Mark sitting in the corner of a dark room, completely silent and inhabiting another planet 

(population of one) 

is impossible to ignore. 

It's this which makes him wonder if Mark had even been studying there with them at all, something which is a bit difficult to work out since neither he nor Dustin will talk about it, and it seems oddly like an open declaration of mistrust 

(which he honestly doesn't feel, he's just _curious_ ) 

to look at the list of alumni or to ask the college outright if Mark was there, even for a semester, even if he never graduated, because where the hell does he come from?

The thing is that even after sharing an apartment with him all this time, Eduardo seriously can't imagine any other way that Mark and Dustin, even with Mark's love for all things forensic and, if possible, unpleasantly dead, could possibly have exchanged even a greeting. 

He has to admit, though, on his side of things, that it's also possible, considering the way he'd gone off to stick his father's expectations somewhere unexpected by joining the Medical Corps, that life had pretty much stopped him right then from thinking about anyone who came from what he was happy to call his past.

His complete breaking away from all the things he associated with that time had quite certainly included Dustin, after all, and how Dustin doesn't hold a grudge against him for that is one of life's minor miracles. 

Dustin, who didn't need to break away from any kind of expectations or impossible standard of imaginary success, who had stayed, and gone down the track which had led him to the morgue.

Fortunate, easy-going Dustin, with whom Eduardo hadn't so much as thought of vaguely keeping in touch, at least not until his second tour was — curtailed, and he had been forced to — come back.

(He calls it that, even in his head, because he is a fucking genius at compartmentalizing, thank you so much, and the other way of thinking about it is that now he's not capable of functioning successfully in either world, civilian or military, and he's not yet ready to face up to that kind of acceptance; he's not ready to be seen as a failure and he really doesn't want to be seen as a success. He's alive, he's making his way on his own, and that's good enough. It has to be.)

As it is, he just blames Dustin for everything that has happened to him since he — came back — and feels justified in doing so.

He especially blames him for Mark.

It was Dustin's idea, after all, to introduce them, so yeah. Speaking of titles, that one should be his.

Dustin Moskovitz. To Blame For Everything.

Divya and his crew set about destroying the carpeting with single-minded determination. Eduardo wonders if there's some way of falsifying papers and getting back into the Medical Corps.

And Sean and Mark, rarely and worryingly, are apparently having a silent argument. It involves a lot of glaring on Mark's part and a badly-suited look of immovable determination on Sean's.

"I am not," Mark says at last, "doing anything that puts me near that woman."

"Divya," Sean says, "take off the baseboard while you're at it."

He's got the canary-eating look again.

Mark groans.

"Yeah, how about someone tells me what's going on?" Eduardo says.

Later, when he's dealing with a drugged and hallucinating Mark, a worried and therefore totally useless Dustin, and a completely absent Sean, plus Chris on the phone demanding to know every five minutes what's happening, he really kind of wishes no one had told him anything, and that he'd gone to find a really good forger instead — or that when they did tell him, he'd gone to find the forger anyway, got his papers, and _not been around for any of it_.

He realizes with miserable and definitely 20-20 hindsight that he could have been half-way to a nice peaceful war-zone, if he'd just thought about it a bit more carefully.

But then, in his own defense, how was he supposed to know just how insanely brilliant Erica Albright is?

~~~

**Now**

"It wasn't because of Erica," Mark says again.

Like him, the rain shows no signs of stopping. Eduardo sighs, and shifts his position so that the pressure of the cold metal bites a little less through his shoes.

"Okay, Mark," he says, tired of fighting. "If you say so."

"Which means you don't believe me," Mark says, with a faint unwelcome bite to his voice. "Fine."

"Fine," Eduardo says tightly. He wants this travesty of a conversation to stop. He wants to go home. He wants to get dry. And more than anything else in the world he wants to never, ever have to see Mark again.

"It was because of you," Mark says then. He's not fidgeting. He's very, very still.

The rain keeps falling, terribly loud.

"If that's true," Eduardo says slowly, "then what you did — what you left us thinking _Milton_ did — it was even worse than I thought." 

He doesn't have to even make an effort to believe what Mark is saying. It's not because it makes sense. It's not even because it's the truth.

It's because Mark quite obviously _believes_ it's the truth, that he obviously believed it _then_ , and that's —

It's appalling.

"Yeah," Mark says. He sounds tired, as tired as Eduardo feels. "I know."

They're both quiet, now.

"Why _Dustin_?" Eduardo bursts out with, at last. "Why did he get to know? All those months, Mark, and I —"

At least now he knows why Dustin wouldn't talk to any of them, wouldn't come to the memorial service, wouldn't even take Eduardo's calls. He'd thought it was grief, back then, and been horrified.

He's no less horrified to realize it was guilt.

"I needed him to help me set the fire," Mark says. Eduardo tips his head back and stares up at him. Mark has the grace to shift a little under his gaze, sounding almost embarrassed as he adds, "And I needed a body to get that burned _in_ the fire. There had to be something left. Even Divya's not that bad."

"Dustin and his John Does," Eduardo says, finally making sense of at least part of it. "God, Mark. How could you —"

"You don't get to ask me that," Mark says, sharp and angry for the first time in all the weeks since his return, and it seems that Eduardo should forget about every deliberate, well thought-out provocation to argument or outright fighting that he's been giving Mark each time they're forced to meet, because it's this kind of childish accusation he should have used if he'd wanted a response. "You don't get to ask me _how_ , not about anything, not — not now, you don't get to ask how I _could_ when you know I did, you, you don't. Get to ask me that."

But he does. 

He does, because he'd been there, and Mark hadn't, Mark had been off somewhere doing his own thing, not involving them, not worrying about them, excusing himself by saying he was doing it _for_ them —

( _for me_ , he thinks, _for me, but no, no, that's just what he's told himself, it doesn't mean anything, I won't let it_ ).

And Milton, Milton the blackmailer, Milton, the owner of secrets and lies, the delighted participant in every tiny betrayal a man could commit to gain money and leverage, Milton had been _there_ , untouchable and gloating and bloated with success, and the only one of them who could have stopped him had been officially declared dead.

How is he supposed to forgive Mark for abandoning them to that?

Eduardo puts a hand around Mark's ankle, and _grips_.

"Oh yeah, I do," he says, and if Mark can get angry? He's got _no idea_ what he's going to get in response. "I do. You want me to believe you did that because of me? Well guess what, you get to _explain yourself_ this time around. Because _you owe me_. So start talking. You wanted me to listen? Well guess what, you win, you got me, well done. Captive audience, right here." He stops, trying to get his words and his mind into some kind of order, and comes up blank. "What the _fuck_ were you thinking?"

Mark wriggles his foot experimentally. Eduardo tightens his grip.

"Wardo, I —" Mark starts, sounding almost pleading. "It wasn't —"

And that, of course, is when Sean opens the window, and, right on cue, starts laughing his ass off at the both of them. 

Equal opportunities mocking, that's Sean for you.

Sometimes it's hard for Eduardo to remember that he actually got to like him, or at least not want to punch him quite as often, after Mark died.

Eduardo also thinks, judging by how wet he feels, and how Mark looks, from what he can make out of him in the dim light, anyway, and with both of them hanging on to a fire escape ladder that doesn't even go down past the second floor, that Sean's probably got a point.

They must look really fucking stupid.

And yet again, it's because of Erica.

Sometimes, Eduardo can see Mark's point about hating her.

~~~

**Then**

"This is not good," Dustin says. "This is really, really not good."

The lack of a scathing response from the expected source is another thing that makes Eduardo extremely disinclined to argue with this assessment.

"I mean, what did she _use_ on him, fuck, this is so not good —"

"Dustin, I got it the first time..." Actually, he'd gotten it the second Mark started making no sense at all in the middle of proving just how much smarter he was, and that having been given only five seconds, than anything Erica could come up with over _months_ , and Erica's smile had been _glorious_ in response to his sudden unnerving turn into vaguely psychotic babble.

Dustin is not dealing very well with any of this. He actually looks annoyed, which isn't an expression that suits him, as well as worried half out of his mind, which is something Eduardo has only seen once before, and could really do without getting in glorious 3D replay. 

It's one thing to know that Mark only chooses to behave like a human being to three and a half members of the whole population, it's quite another to be forcibly reminded that those people care about him, too, that it's not just Eduardo out there on his own giving any kind of damn. 

It should be comforting. Right now, with Mark's eyes flickering round his own living room like it's filled with ghosts, Eduardo's not comforted at all, because no, he's not on his own, that's great, but the only one who's actually here, out of the other two and a half remaining if you discount _him_ from their number, is Dustin.

And Dustin is torn between taking half of Mark's blood to run tests, because wow, drug he can't recognize straight off, and just flailing.

At the moment, flailing is winning.

"And what was Sean thinking, anyway, telling him to go to talk to her?"

"Probably," Eduardo says bitterly, "that he only wants to see little green men in the corner —" or whatever the fuck it is that Mark _is_ seeing. He's pretty sure oysters come into it somewhere, and radioactive sentient ones at that. The cab driver enduring that particularly disgusting description of what was happening to the interior of his vehicle had been even more freaked out than Mark and Eduardo combined, and half-way convinced, from what Eduardo could tell, that he was seeing them too — "on his own time."

Dustin winces. "Yeah, somehow I doubt Erica cares enough about Sean to do whatever this is to him."

Eduardo stares at him. "Dustin, seriously, you need a dictionary. Or professional help. _What_?"

"And by caring I mean hating his guts," Dustin explains.

Oh. Okay.

Mark chooses this moment to demonstrate his continuing affinity with the shellfish world by clamping his hand around Eduardo's wrist like a particularly vicious limpet.

"Ow," Eduardo says weakly.

" _Make it stop_ ," Mark hisses, and Dustin's face twists up in much the same way as something in Eduardo's chest has just done, because Mark should never, ever sound like that, and God, Eduardo would give just about anything to do what's been asked of him.

More worrying still, he keeps finding his free hand twitching out for his med-pack, because the next step after someone says something like that?

Tends to be one nice syringe of morphine.

He's uncomfortably aware that right now, Mark's very far from the only one in the room seeing things move in the shadows.

"Okay," he says, soothing and useless. "Okay, Mark, it's wearing off, you're going to be fine, I don't think she meant to do anything permanent."

"Please," Mark says quietly, and curls forward on their abused couch, pressing his head against Eduardo's arm, burying his face in the crook of his elbow. His breath is short and somehow jagged, and his skin is far too hot, and Eduardo is worried half to death. "I can't — Wardo, I can't think."

The last word sounds uncomfortably close to a sob, and Eduardo gives up on trying to be professional and not-seeing ghosts and everything that he's thought up until now was keeping him on the 'I'm alive and making it' end of the spectrum lying between success and failure, and puts his hand on the back of Mark's tangled head.

"So don't," he says simply. "You don't have to. I promise. Not right now."

"I keep seeing —"

"Close your eyes." He shifts Mark into a slightly more comfortable position that doesn't involve his wrist being crushed or Mark twisted in on himself like a pretzel. "There's a sedative in there with everything else, I'm pretty sure. Try and let it work."

Mark shakes his head violently, bruising Eduardo's ribs. "Can't."

"Sure you can."

"But I won't — I won't know you're here. If I sleep, you won't be here."

"I'm not going anywhere," Eduardo promises. He's not. He doesn't care if Sean gets back and wants a full report, he doesn't care if Chris flies out of Washington and needs to be picked up at the airport, he doesn't care if Erica's gone to Mexico and is about to mail them all tickets to join her, he doesn't care if Dustin removes two pints of blood from each of them and then moves on to plasma donations. He doesn't care.

And he's not moving.

"Real," Mark says nonsensically, but at least he's got his eyes shut, and that's probably half the battle won. "You. Stay."

Eduardo does.

And when Sean _does_ come in, a little grey around the lips and obviously needing to use his inhaler, apologies spilling from him like water and three times as useless, having been pointlessly trying to get Erica into custody, he takes one look at Eduardo's expression and walks straight back out, taking Dustin with him with one hand clamped over the red-headed mortician's mouth, and ignoring the fact that Dustin is most probably licking his palm, judging from his disgusted grimacing.

Mark doesn't thank any of them, later.

He's too busy chasing Erica, his eternal pursuit in the cause of intellectual victory, running after something none of them can see, down a path they can't follow.

And at the end of the path lies not some unnamable prize, not some absolute pinnacle of superiority, but a man named Gus Milton.

Milton, and blackmail, and death.

("Real. You. Stay.")

And he does.

Through all of it.

Because he has the stupidity and hope to think that with Mark drugged out of his mind, and holding onto Eduardo's arm, hand, wrist, anything he could find in his nightmare-ridden, unhappy half-sleep, he has seen Mark's core, his heart; that he's somehow gained his trust, gained his —

Sean can say love all he likes. He can send unicorns puking rainbows in nasty little .gifs to Eduardo's mailbox as often as he feels like it.

It doesn't make any difference, and it really doesn't matter.

Because Mark is chasing Erica.

And Erica is dancing with death for her partner; death for her lover; Erica, who in New York can now take a bride of her own, if she wants to; Erica has made herself into the Corpse Bride, the damning and the damned.

And Eduardo's not sure if Mark wants to stop her or take her partner's place.

Erica and Milton, locked in some contest neither of them even seem to want to escape, and Chris desperate on the phone, because one of them knows something and Mark must stop them both

("Please, please Mark, please, she could use it —"

"It's not her you should be worried about. And anyway, that one's gone."

"Mark —"

"Chris. It's done, okay.")

Mark snapping, ignoring texts.

Mark obsessed.

**I could make him beg.** Erica texts Eduardo once. **Could you?**

He doesn't reply.

He's already heard Mark beg. He's heard dozens of men beg. Beg for the pain to stop, beg to be saved, beg and cry and plead and he'd never been able to even reach them, not with words, not with skill, not with drugs, as they bit back screams or cried out loud in their agony.

Mark's the first one he ever got through to.

And that's between them, and Erica has no right to ask.

He never answers the text.

Later, he knows he should have.

But later is when Erica is dead and Chris has given Eduardo the proof, because there is no one else Mark will believe it from, and later is _Milton_ , always Milton, Milton and his victims who'll never admit that

(they did something to be blackmailed about)

they even met the man, and Mark is furious, furious in some burning, acid way that no one can touch.

No one can, not anymore — not Sean, not Dustin, not Eduardo, not even Chris in person, trying with all he has left to get through and make Mark give up hope, make him stop, make him for once in his life step back and admit defeat.

All of them telling him that he's the best, yes, of course he is, no one's questioning that, but that even the best need to know when winning will hurt more than it can help or save.

Sean is the one to put it out there, tentatively —

"Mark, if you — if you had something to do with Erica —"

And Mark blanches, shakes his head, shoves his hands out of sight into the pockets of his hoodie, and shakes his head again.

"I had to ask, buddy," Sean points out, but Mark only shakes his head once more, blank-eyed in a way that he never is with them, never is with Sean, with Dustin — never, ever is with Eduardo, not now, hasn't been since he realized that it actually hurt him — and retreats into the world that lies on his computer, the graphs and connections and algorithms of human nature that no one else can follow.

Eduardo doesn't ask. He makes tea instead of bringing Mark energy drinks, which is ignored, 

(of course it's ignored, because Mark doesn't speak _people_ unless he's working out the how of an impossible crime, so why should he speak the language of 

_please stop killing yourself, I like you around_?)

— and when Mark begins to ask him if he thinks that Erica really is dead, Eduardo can only reply uselessly that he doesn't know.

Does he think Mark could be the one who killed her? Is that what Mark's asking? Is that what this has become? 

_did you kill her, Mark, are you that man, too, now?_

(is this what he's really being asked, is it Mark's own way of inverting the question that Sean was answered with by his silent withdrawal — 

"Do you think I did?")

And more than that, worse than that, what he wants to answer both questions with, the spoken and the unspoken, isn't 'I don't know,' but a question all his own. What he wants to ask is —

_Do_ you _think that she's dead? Or do you_ know _? Do you know because you finally caught up with her, ended it, found the one trump card, took her hands for the final dance, finished this for good?_

He never asks, he never even hints that he wants to put any of it into words. He's a better man than that, and it's not a question worthy of who he tries to be.

And if he says those words aloud, if he shows even for a second that he is capable of that kind of doubt, he knows he wouldn't be forgiven.

Because Mark answered once, he answered Sean, and that should be enough, it has to be enough; Eduardo will make it enough, for both of them.

(But he thinks later that Mark read the question in his eyes 

that it was the moment when Mark broke faith with them because none of them had retained faith in him 

that seeing those unvoiced words written clearly in Eduardo's silence was the moment when he knew he was alone; the moment he decided to leave them just as he was always being left).

And none of them see what their belief in him, forced or otherwise, will cause, because they are too busy trying to make him listen to them to stop and listen to him.

Mark on his dark and silent planet, flickering through his mind's images there.

(population of one)

It should be more. 

_Real. You. Stay._

But he can't, not every minute of every day, not wondering as he does if Mark really has — if Erica's death really is on those too-long-fingered, disproportionately beautiful hands — he can't.

_Stay._

He would have, later. When he began to suspect the truth, he would have.

And later is too late.

Eduardo tries not to blame himself for that too much, in the time that follows.

~~~

**Now**

Sean takes them back to the station, less because he has to or wants to 

(which he points out with rare curtness)

than because he is not their cab service, and since they are both determined (in his words) to be complete dicks about the apartment and Mark not going back there —

("It's the only thing you can agree on, being stupid fucking assholes, and even I can't call this progress. Also, you're making my car wet, not cool —")

he decides they can sort out their own transport to wherever the fuck they want to be that isn't within a mile's radius of each other.

So they stand by the front desk and try to pretend no one's worried about getting put in a cell.

"You're the worst detective ever," Mark says bitterly. "Aren't you supposed to arrest the main suspects?"

"And when I catch up with her, I'll give it my best shot," Sean says, with just a little too much emphasis on the last word for it to be a random, innocent choice.

Mark shuts up at that.

"Didn't he tell you about her, either?" Eduardo asks sweetly.

"No. He didn't have to." Sean is well past angry at both of them, which is a novelty Eduardo would be sort of enjoying under any other circumstances, or at least under drier ones. "Erica's got all our numbers, and she does like keeping in _touch_."

And wow, Sean's got the skill of putting a double meaning into every clause down to a fine art, which is actually impressive at whatever unholy hour of the dark a.m. it is.

Mark, though, is completely ignoring Sean in favor of staring at Eduardo.

"Wait, you _knew_ she wasn't dead?" he asks, and there's a completely unwarranted note of betrayal in his voice. "How — how long, what, why didn't — you didn't say, you never —"

"I didn't tell you I knew she wasn't dead?" Eduardo stares at him. "You — you're — Mark, you redefine impossible, how was I supposed to tell you when — oh, oh right, yeah, I _did_ tell you, I fucking apologized to your cremated remains, but then you wouldn't know about that, obviously, since there aren't any ghosts and you weren't one anyway, so I guess you missed all that. Yeah, Mark, I knew, of course I knew, I've known forever, she sent me a text the day you —"

_Died_ , he can't say, and knows he doesn't have to.

Mark's eyes have gone very wide, and he's completely still, like he was when Sean asked him all that time ago about Erica's death and whether he had been involved; very still and very quiet and his energy all drawn inward, focused on something Eduardo doesn't want to think about, because he might have to feel something other than justified resentment if he does.

After a long, long minute where the only sound seems to be Sean's soft cursing, Mark says quietly,

"Please." It may be the first time Eduardo's ever heard him use the word sincerely when not out of his mind on drugs, and sincere it quite definitely is. The sound of it terrifies him as much as the hallucinations did, all that time ago. "Please. Tell me that's not true."

"Ironic, right?" Eduardo manages a smile.

"Mark, wait, did you —" Sean tries, and Mark turns on him with a viciousness that he usually reserves for a display of unwanted sympathy, or an attempt at understanding, snarling —

" _Shut up_!"

Sean holds up his hands and takes an exaggerated step backwards, ending up almost plastered against the front desk. They must, Eduardo thinks distantly, be putting on quite a show for anyone awake enough to be interested.

"So all that time," Mark says. He looks as though someone's taken a knife to him, shocked and bloodless. "All that time, you thought I was dead and you knew she wasn't. No wonder you — fuck. Of course you thought it was for her. What else —" He stops again, looking into whatever inward horror he saw before, but this time he's not — quite — still. One hand comes up, and he touches the bridge of his nose, brings his fingers down to hover over his mouth, resting on the air trapped there.

If he were anyone else, Eduardo thinks, his hand would be shaking. But it's Mark, and so he's perfectly steady, perfectly contained.

And broken in half.

"I'm sorry," Eduardo says impulsively, because he is, he truly is, not for what he's said but for what saying it has done, because he's never thought of being the reason Mark would look like that, never mind wanted to be the cause of it, even at his angriest, and Mark shakes his head, quick and almost angry.

"No. No, it — no." He swallows visibly. "I should go. I need — I have to go."

Eduardo's too stunned to do anything to stop him when he walks out, back into the rain. After a moment, he moves to follow, and is caught back by Sean's hand on his arm.

"Don't," Sean says, remarkably gently. He sounds oddly like he did in those miserable weeks following the fire. "Not a good idea right now."

"But I don't understand," Eduardo says, and for the first time he realizes that he really doesn't. "I mean, he knew, right? That's why he did what he did, because he knew —"

But Sean's shaking his head.

"No," he says, still in that strange kind voice. "Sounds weird to hear, forget about say, and man do I ever know this — and I so wish it weren't me saying it now, but yeah, he didn't know until after he was dead, either."

It feels like the moment in dreams that never comes, the moment of waking.

It feels like hitting the ground

(impact, collision, the force of an unseen blow).

It feels like truth.

"You know why he did it, don't you?" Eduardo says blankly. "You _know_."

"Yeah," Sean agrees with a faint wince. He drops his hand from Eduardo's arm. "But only because I know why he came back."

~~~

**Then**

Mark can't seem to get any sort of handle on Milton or his activities. He's got Chris on his back as well as Sean, and Chris's frightening brand of efficiency seems to be knotting him up more rather than helping.

The phone calls are painful to listen to, Chris trying to talk Mark down from something Eduardo's not really sure he wants to know about, and Mark refusing to come away from his vertigo-inducing ledge of furious concentration.

("I won't give this up, Chris, I won't — yes, fucking right it's about revenge, you think I'm going to let it go, now I know? Just like that?"

_You have to, you have to, you have to_ , Eduardo's heart beats out, sullen and emphatic.

He hopes each and every time that Chris will succeed, and get Mark to listen.

He's shamefully pleased when Chris fails, because it means he hasn't been replaced as the only one who can get through to Mark)

Eduardo still doesn't ask whether Mark knows more about Erica's death than he's saying, and Mark hasn't asked him again whether he really thinks she's dead, but the questions are there, hovering between them all the time, important now in that they can't ever be asked aloud.

(and he can't get through, Mark's a blank wall of reinforced glass, and he can't get through)

He gives up on the concept of tea. He hates the stuff anyway, would rather have coffee, and Mark doesn't drink that either unless they've run out of everything else and he's desperate, so at least he's not adding to his own woes and feelings of inadequacy

("Stop _hovering_ —")

with yet another failure.

It's as though they've gone back in time, back to the first days of apartment-sharing, when Eduardo needed too much personal space and Mark hated to be touched, and somehow that never quite made it into the world of compatible living.

(it should have been easy, and it was so very hard, because space was Eduardo's luxury and touch was his way of assuring himself of

reality

life, alive, he's alive, it's not there, and it's not then

it's reality)

And now Mark flinches if Eduardo's too close, never mind touches him, moves away in his seat when Eduardo comes to look at whatever it is he's found, in case even their arms brush.

And Mark has stopped sleeping and Eduardo's dreaming again and they're not talking about any of it.

Milton's vanished.

"Maybe Erica took him down with her," Eduardo suggests once, and Mark gives him the kind of look he usually reserves for Divya, before retreating to his room with his phone, Eduardo's phone, and the laptop, and doesn't come out for the rest of the day.

He's quiet enough to suggest that he might be sleeping, but Eduardo knows better.

("Mark, you know — you know you can tell me anything, right? Even if — whatever. Anything."

Mark opening his mouth, taking a breath, a second passing for long enough for Eduardo to hope — but no.

"I'm fine, Wardo. Everything's fine.")

Everything's a lie, and the world Eduardo took so long to construct when he came — back, that he fought so hard to shore up and maintain, even when the dreams come more than once a night, even when he can't stop _remembering_ , even when he wants to walk into the living room and say to Mark "This is what happened, and nothing happened and everything happened and no one can know, Mark, no one can ever know —"

That world is crumbling around him.

His father doesn't call, and no one else does from what he still thinks of as home, either.

There's no one left but Mark he can trust.

And Mark doesn't want to know, wouldn't want to listen, and would never ask what he was talking about—

Sometimes Eduardo thinks that he knows anyway, that he's not asking because he doesn't want to scrape old wounds raw, but this is Mark, to whom knowledge is more important than life, than his own life, than anyone's life, and — no.

Foolish to think that, foolish to wish that.

Mark doesn't want to know, and Eduardo will never speak to his father again, and those are the constants he must never allow himself to forget.

(any more than the sand that was more like dust and the blood ingrained in his nails and the knowledge of loss that wasn't his to own).

And Mark goes out one morning, just as it gets light, leaving a quick scribbled note on a post-it stuck to the fridge that Eduardo doesn't see until _two days later_

(not that it makes or would have made any difference, he would always have been too late)

and the next time Eduardo sees him, he can't bring himself to believe that he's looking at another constant, another truth.

Because Mark is dead, and unrecognizably dead, and there is no world left to crumble, let alone one that he can try and hold up.

He thought he'd known loss before.

He thought he'd known grief.

He'd been horribly, horribly wrong about both.

Because there's no loss or grief worse than those that even the dead don't know are real.

("Real. You. Stay.")

Sean cries, messy and incoherent and raging, furious with his department, who seem to be actually relieved at Mark's death; furious with himself, for not having realized that Mark was bound to have some idiotic plan; and Sean is the only one who seems capable of showing anything, now, and Eduardo almost loves him for it, in the strange unwilling kind of way that you do when someone's your family, you love them whether you want to or not, and you do what you can for them whether you're up to the task or not —

(dear God, when did Sean become someone he thinks of as family, how did that happen, why has it taken the loss of the one thing they supposedly had in common for Eduardo to understand this?)

— and Chris flies in at last, after what feels like a thousand phone-calls and cancelled arrangements

(too late too late they are all too late and were always going to be)

looking like a ghost himself and carrying inexplicable guilt, because Eduardo had heard him, he'd _heard_ him, telling Mark to stop — out of all of them, he's the least to blame.

And Dustin, Dustin who Eduardo thinks was probably Mark's constant, now that he has to revise history; now that he has to look back at what they all failed to do, look back at how they all failed to see the inevitable approaching —

(Dustin with his random, unsolicited advice

"You know gibbering irritation isn't actually emotion, right? It's just Mark in a snit."

"I am _not in a snit_ , God, Dustin, what is _wrong_ with you —"

"See what I mean?"

"I'm objecting to the word, have you been reading those all-girls' school books again?"

"It's a perfectly good word and horribly underused and I am making sure it feels all appreciated for once because it gets ignored. Come on, Mark, you've got to feel sorry for it, poor little word...")

Dustin won't talk to any of them, except maybe Chris, and whatever he says then leaves Chris looking worse than before.

Eduardo misses him, too.

He could show Dustin the note, could show him and have someone to share that last devastating moment of failure with; he could show Dustin and know that someone else in the world understood how it felt to be left.

But Dustin's never there anymore, never here anymore, even when he's in contact he's miles away from them, as if now that Mark's sunless planet is empty, he's taken up residence on its isolated surface.

Eduardo wants, more than anything, to talk to him. He can't pass the note on to Chris, who doesn't deserve another burden that's not his to carry in any case; he certainly can't show it to Sean, who's devastated enough as it is.

But Dustin's gone from his life as surely as Mark has, and Eduardo's alone with the two quickly scrawled sentences and a lifetime of _if only_ stretching out in front of him.

_  
Wardo,_

_Gone to meet Milton, he's got what I need, finally agreed to hand it over._

_See you later, thanks for everything,_

_Mark._

It's the worst goodbye Eduardo's ever received.

But despite that fact, he still knows what it was meant as.

And he knows he wasn't there. He knows now that he'd rather live with the memory of blood on his hands, dream of it forever, than know instead that he wasn't there.

It's weeks before he even remembers the text from Erica, and then he doesn't even need to consider showing it to anyone.

She doesn't _deserve_ to be acknowledged as alive.

~~~

**Now**

"It was you Milton was after," Sean says, once he's got them both into his office and closed the blinds. "Mark didn't want you to know, God knows why, I told him he was stupid then and I told him the same thing when he decided to turn zombie and come back."

"Why didn't he _say_?" Eduardo can't get past this simple point. "He could have said. He could have told me. Back then, I mean, not now, but back then, he could, he could have told me."

"Yeah, you're kind of assuming Mark thinks like a normal human being, though," Sean says with a sigh. "As far as I can make out, he thought you didn't know yourself that you were open to Milton's kind of — ugh, let's say persuasion, blackmail's too ordinary a word and I can't think of a better one —"

"I bet Dustin can," Eduardo says with a faint smile, and Sean snorts laughter out on a rough breath.

"Yeah, and I bet Mark's heard them all and hated them worse with each try. But — he thought you didn't know. And he figured if he was the only thing standing between you and Milton — and he was, trust me on this, he really was by the end, from what he's told me since — then to give me the leverage I needed to make an official move, he needed to disappear, and force Milton to move against you directly. Except disappearing wouldn't be good enough, that wouldn't make Milton do anything but hide deep. He needed to be out of it for good."

"He needed to be dead, and he knew we all had to believe it —"

"So that Milton would believe it, yeah." Sean rubs his hands over his face. He looks past even simple exhaustion. "I know he's got all kinds of reasoning — hell, I've heard it all, believe me — as to why Dustin got to know his plan, but I think the truth is he knew Dustin was safe. Milton doesn't even seem to have known Dustin existed, so it didn't matter whether he knew the truth or not. And —"

"Guilt's the only thing that could have kept Dustin away from us," Eduardo says with a glimmer of respect for Mark's horrible thought-processes. "So he'd _stay_ safe."

"Yeah. I mean, it should have worked, right? And it did, to a point. Except it turns out Milton never really believed Mark was dead. He knew Erica was alive too, by that time, and he figured — I'm guessing here, remember, but I think he figured out that what someone could pull off once could be repeated. So he never made his move. Not against you, anyway, and Mark was relying on that, on you being the one person who wouldn't lie. You're braver than that, he said, you'd never deny your past to keep your reputation all shiny and let Milton go."

"And Milton kept working and everyone else kept lying — and Mark must have been waiting, and waiting, and nothing ever — fuck." Eduardo can't imagine it, can't imagine having that kind of faith in someone, and can't imagine what he's ever done to deserve it. His throat hurts. "So what made him come back? He gave up waiting? Decided he could force it? What?"

"Erica," Sean says simply, and just like that, all Eduardo's understanding evaporates.

"So it was for her —"

"No." Sean puts his hands up in an increasingly familiar posture of defense. "No, well, yeah, it was because she contacted him, but no. Not exactly. Erica wanted Milton dead, but she wasn't going to kill him while he had things out there that could hurt the people she knows. Too risky. So she started intercepting, and she got hold of — well, what Mark was after, before. I really don't want to know what that woman did to the mail, Wardo, but let's just say you should be fucking singing for joy at the fact your father's _still_ not talking to you. Because man, that would not have been a good kind of icebreaker."

"Milton was going — Milton —" Eduardo still isn't sure of what it was that Milton had, but he's equally sure that he never, ever wants his father to get hold of it.

"Your father's the one with the money," Sean says carefully. "And talking to you or not, I'd bet my salary he'd pay whatever he was asked to keep _his_ name clean." He looks almost sad. "Same name. You never changed it."

"No," Eduardo murmurs. "No, that was the point..."

"Yeah, well it was a fucking stupid point when someone like Milton had it," Sean says with a welcome return to his usual disparaging self. "Anyway, that doesn't matter. Erica got hold of it first, or at least got hold of the original, contacted Mark, and gave it to him. All debts paid, Mark says, and believe me, I'm not asking more about that."

"For drugging him," Eduardo says, understanding this part at least. "She owed him an apology, it was supposed to just knock him out."

Sean nods, obviously fitting the last puzzle piece into his framework. "Yeah, that figures. So anyway, with you off the hook, Mark had no reason to stay away — and remember, most of this is his version, you're free to draw whatever extra conclusions you like, I definitely have — but he did have a reason to come back. He needed to make sure Milton didn't have any copies."

"But Erica didn't care about that. She just wanted Milton dead," Eduardo says, remembering Mark's frantic call to him earlier, telling him where to go, saying —

_"You can go back to behaving as though I'm dead, you can do anything, I'll give you whatever you want, but you have to meet me tonight."_

Had he been trying to stop Erica even then, was he trying to bring Milton to some kind of recognizable justice?

It doesn't make sense.

But Sean seems to think Eduardo's got it, that he's following, because he's almost smiling, sounding relieved.

"Yeah, and she'd tapped Mark's phone, she knew he'd find Milton first. Mark was playing her and Milton both, he didn't think I could do anything — fuck, we all know he was right on that one — but if he got Erica into Milton's rooms, he knew what would happen."

"You're guessing again," Eduardo says, unable to resist it even while the shock starts to hit him.

"No," Sean says. "No, I'm not. I know Mark can't kill. He should be able to. But he can't. He knows too much about death to be comfortable dealing it out — for God's sake, don't ever tell him I know that, he'll find some kind of vengeance to bring down on me that I really need a year's sleep to even consider — and he can't. And he knew none of us were ever going to be able to get Milton any legal way. Well, unless he suddenly decided to say fine, and let your father have — er, whatever it is Mark now has that I totally don't know about."

"So he gave the time and the place to me and Erica both." Eduardo laughs in disbelief. "You _are_ guessing, Sean. Why me? Why not you? Mark was the one Erica phone-tapped, not me, so why did I have to be there? He could have made that call to anyone!"

"You didn't have to be there," Sean says bluntly. "But there's only one person Milton would believe Mark capable of selling his pride for. And it's sure as fuck not Erica or me or even Dustin, and it's damn sure not Chris or the government. Once Milton knew he was bringing you, that you were going to be there too? Hell, yeah, he believed it was on the up. He thought he'd won."

"You're crazy," Eduardo says faintly.

"Me? Nope." Sean's smile is the old, infuriating, canary-eating variety. "But Mark is. When it comes to you. Fuck, do I have to spell it out? Mark knows why you got out of the Corps. He knows about the guy who died. The _married_ guy who died, and trust me, I wish I didn't know either, but I kind of made him tell me. If it hadn't been for Milton, he'd never have mentioned it to a living soul, he was waiting for you to trust him enough to tell him, or trust yourself enough to tell him, or what-the-fuck-ever it was you were holding back for. And he'd have kept right on, waiting. But he didn't have a choice." Sean shrugs. "I guess he just loves you too much to be the one to smack you in the face with your own stupidity. I don't have that problem."

Eduardo imagines that he looks as though he's been smacked in the face, too, and possibly with a dead wet fish.

"Mark knows," he says at last. "Mark's always known. He was telling the truth, after — it was because of me. The stupid, idiotic —"

"There's a really famous saying about glass houses," Sean interjects with a smirk, and Eduardo looks around for something to throw at him. "Oh fuck, Wardo, at least avoid my face..."

Eduardo doesn't. He leans across the desk and kisses Sean on his forehead instead.

" _Thank you_ ," he says fervently.

"Ew," says Sean, rubbing the back of his hand frantically over any area of skin Eduardo's mouth might have touched. "Lovely. You're not welcome. And shouldn't you — don't you have somewhere else to be? Like, now?"

Eduardo grins at him, and it hurts the sides of his face with how wide it is, but it doesn't hurt anywhere else.

Joy doesn't, after all.

"Fuck yeah I do," he says with a kind of shivering glee. 

"I never thought I'd say this," Sean mutters as he gets up to leave, "but man, do I ever pity Dustin."

~~~

"Oh good, more wet people," Dustin says when he opens the door. "Wet person. People. You're people, fucking hell I need sleep, Wardo, if you're here to yell, please go away and come back tomorrow —"

"Shut up, Dustin," Eduardo says. He can't stop smiling.

"Okay," Dustin says slowly, "you look kind of — oh wait, no you don't, you don't look scary at all, you look — wet. I mean wet. Obviously, you look wet, you are wet. Not like the best thing ever at all, no, honestly, not even a little bit, just wet."

"Thank you?" Eduardo says, trying not to laugh. "Do I get to come in, as a non-scary wet person?"

"Oh yeah," Dustin says. He looks like Eduardo feels, with a side order of gleeful mania. "Yeah, definitely yeah." He flings the door open wide. "By all means, yeah."

"Dustin, if you're talking to your front lawn again, I don't want to know," Mark's irritable voice says from somewhere back in the house, and Dustin gets an attack of silent laughter that thankfully forces him to stay put and lean against the wall to catch his breath, while Eduardo goes in search of the voice's owner.

Mark's in Dustin's kitchen, and he's considerably drier than when Eduardo last saw him, but he's not at all happier-looking, even from the back.

He's got his head stuck in the fridge, looking for what Eduardo would guess is the ever-evasive miracle food that will suddenly seem attractive at horrible a.m.; he's wearing what has to be one of Dustin's T-shirts on back-to-front 

(at least Eduardo assumes it's on back-to-front, because Dustin prefers his annoying geek slogans to face people rather than walk away from them. This one says something entirely in code that Eduardo isn't even going to bother to try and decipher)

and it's all so familiar that the old, twisting thing that Eduardo used to call affection seems to take over his entire body, leaving him standing in the doorway and completely voiceless.

"Why do you have five jars of different kinds of pickled chilies?" Mark asks the interior of the fridge with a sort of blank misery, and Eduardo starts grinning all over again, because God, God, he's missed this.

"You'd better ask Dustin that," he says when he can trust his voice. "I don't know. I don't care. I just learned you're not the most intelligent person I know, and I'm reeling from the shock."

Mark straightens up with a jolt, and bangs his head on the fridge shelf.

"Ow, fuck, ow, what, Wardo, listen, I —"

"You're an idiot," Eduardo says. It feels like he's been waiting his whole life to say it. "You're a total fucking idiot, and your only excuse for being such an idiot is that I'm a worse one, so I guess your terrible fall from grace is all my fault."

"What?" Mark's turned around now, and is blinking at him with an expression that's very far from blank, but doesn't seem to have decided what else to be. Hope's definitely in there, but there's far too much fear battling with it, and Eduardo doesn't like that at all.

"Mark. Why didn't you just _tell me_?"

"Oh." Mark's face does go blank at that. "Milton. Yeah. I thought —"

"Not Milton," Eduardo clarifies, "although yes, Milton, we are definitely going to talk about Milton later, because that adds to your idiot points, but no. Why did you let everyone else tell me I was in love with you?"

"Er," says Mark, coherently, and then, "wait, what, no, wait, that — you mean that I'm in love with, they told you that I, they — what?"

"I meant exactly what I just said," Eduardo says far more calmly than he feels, "and now I'm really hoping so did you. Although I'd like it better if you finished the sentence."

"Okay," Mark says, looking utterly confused. "Which one?"

"The one that's supposed to end with the word you," Eduardo says gently.

"I'm in love with you?" Only Mark, Eduardo thinks, can make a question sound so utterly disbelieving and such a statement of fact at the same time. "I'm sure Sean explained that one in detail —"

"No." Eduardo finally manages to convince his legs to work, and comes into the kitchen. "No, he explained how you're an idiot in detail. He explained how I'm an idiot in detail. And I think, disgusting though the thought is, he gave me his blessing, which, ugh, I don't want to think about, but Mark. Did you honestly not know? Did you really not know what even Erica worked out? No, of course you didn't, why am I even asking, okay, small words."

"Hopefully fewer of them," Mark grumbles, but he hasn't tried to go anywhere and he's still looking at Eduardo, and that's good enough.

"I love you. I'm in love with you. I have been for ages. Even when I tried to hate you. Even when you were dead. I never stopped."

And Mark — says nothing, and for the first time, Eduardo feels doubt creep in that Sean was right, that _he's_ got it right, the fear fills him that this is some horrible mistake, some kind of worse stupidity than he's committed so far —

And then Mark's kissing him, and it doesn't matter, because he wasn't wrong, he wasn't wrong, neither of them are going to be wrong any more, and oh thank God and —

"Mark?" he asks, pulling back a little.

"Mmph, Wardo, no talking, busy."

"No, Mark, wait, I —"

But Mark has no intention of waiting, and being the single object of all that terrifying focus, usually only turned inward, is incredibly distracting, so it takes several minutes and Dustin wailing about his poor kitchen and his virgin eyes 

(or possibly the other way around) 

before Eduardo gets a chance to marshal his thoughts again.

"Mark. The photo. Milton had the photo, didn't he?"

"Yeah," Mark says into his neck, Dustin's complaints having just moved his attentions rather than distracted him.

"So —"

Mark does pull back then, and grins at him, open and happy and pleased with himself, and Eduardo doesn't care what the answer is any more, as long as Mark keeps looking like that, and —

"I burned it, of course," Mark says, and he's blushing now. "Of course I burnt it. Why do you think I'm not jealous any more?"

~~~

**Then**

"You don't need a job," Mark says. "You can work with me. I need a partner."

"Mark, I don't even know what it is you —"

"I make people care about the dead," Mark says. "And then I get Sean to arrest the reasons they're dead. Sound like a cause?"

"Um, yes, I suppose —"

"Good, I practiced that speech. And Chris said it was okay. So good. Great. You can get started on helping me order these ridiculous autopsy photos."

"Mark, I'm not sure I'm even a doctor any more —"

"That's okay," Mark says. "You'll make a brilliant specialist. Or, well, no, but you'll help me be a brilliant specialist, same thing."

Eduardo laughs, and gives in, and gives up, and shakes his head, and starts going through the photos.

And it's —

He knows what he's looking at.

"Mark, I think there's something on this one..."

Their shoulders brush as Mark leans in to see, and it's his personal space, and he should hate the fact that Mark's in it, but it's touch, as well, and it feels —

It feels all right.

No. More than that.

Better than that.

It feels _right_. 

And something small and sharp and fiercely, destructively alive, something that seems to have been left in him by the dust and the blood, and has been digging its way through his heart with a splinter of denied anguish for a spade ever since — that small thing settles down, and begins to lie quiet.

~~~

**Now**

"Still jealous?" Eduardo asks sometimes.

"Still not forgiven me?" Mark retorts.

"For being dead? Never."

"Of your soldier? Always."

They never laugh at that. It's too dear, too priceless, too costly an admission.

And Eduardo kisses him, because he can, and pulls Mark closer, to lie against him, because that is what they both prefer when they're actually aiming for sleep and not something more

(and then there is no preference, only skin-hunger, and the touch of one another, and the crisp-clear delight over-riding it all of something found and rediscovered, old and new, all at once

to never get tired of, never be fatigued or dulled or disenchanted by, because it is theirs and because they made and make and remake it, each and every time, the strange pleasure and joy of it a new constant for them both)

and he breathes.

And his heart beats, and doesn't ache, and Mark elbows him in the ribs when he makes himself more comfortable, and Eduardo stills him with a touch.

And when Mark is finally still, and his eyes are closed, and his body

(though never, ever his mind)

is at peace —

Then, and only then, Eduardo turns out the light.

FIN.

**Author's Note:**

> Mark as Sherlock, Eduardo as John, Erica as Irene, Sean as Lestrade, Dustin as an odd combination of Molly and Mike Stanford, Chris as a less-involved and non-brotherly Mycroft, Divya as a kind of Anderson, and the not-very-OC Milton (a combination of all versions of Moriarty and Conan Doyle's Milverton)
> 
> This is a cross (or perhaps a blend) between TSN, BBC Sherlock, and the original works of Arthur Conan Doyle (to whom I am particularly indebted for the oysters, as well as for the blackmailer Milverton, a man whom Sherlock Holmes does not admire or regard in any way, as he does Moriarty, but only loathes, as he does the huge and creeping snakes in the zoo.)
> 
> With endless thanks to alernun, quoshara, and harriet_vane at livejournal, who made this readable and to whom I owe the fact this fic exists at all.


End file.
